


That Perfect Stillness

by marginalia



Category: The Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-08-17
Updated: 2003-08-17
Packaged: 2018-10-07 20:40:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10368966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marginalia/pseuds/marginalia





	

_Dominic dreams and it is mist, dense and grey. The air is full of voices, high and low, loud and soft, speaking and shouting and crying and singing a language he has only just forgotten._

_He looks down and sees Billy's hand in his, slim and pale. "I think I need a drink," Dream Billy murmurs, eyes tired._

_The voices grow louder, move closer, and stop altogether._

_Dominic looks at the ground beneath them and notes with more detachment than dismay that their feet are dissolving, eaten by the silent fog._

_It is painless._

_He dreams no more that night._

.:.

In the morning, Billy asked him how he slept. Billy said he seemed quieter now. That for once Dominic hadn't kicked him in the night.

Dominic slouched against the counter, waiting for the toast, and gave a non-committal response.

He did not tell Billy about the dream.

In the course of a week he told Elijah, who deemed it "fucked up, man", Sean, who conferred with Christine and suggested he write about it, offering web sites and books to guide him, and finally Orlando, who hummed softly into the phone and did not attempt to label or explain it at all.

Dominic rummaged through still-unpacked boxes for hours before he found the journal Billy had given him months before. It was a beautiful book, bound in black, tooled leather, and he weighed it in his hand.

It had seemed too much, before. He had been almost afraid to write in it, to mar the unlined pages. But now it felt right, to pour into this gift of Billy's what he could not tell the man himself.

.:.

Dominic wrote the dream, but the chill of it slipped from him, always just beyond the reach of his pen. He nibbled the cap and tried again, writing the feeling rather than the facts, the fear and the fantasy. Words stepped carefully across the page. The dream. This life. This moment. Billy.

Billy. Billy laughing. Billy in the rain. Billy asleep. Billy lost in a past that Dominic could not touch.

Dominic slammed the book shut and hid it away in his bedside drawer.

.:.

The dream came only rarely at first, but always with the same haunting voices and melting mist. He woke later on dream-days, an odd reluctance to leave the chill and the voices. He awoke under the scrutiny of Billy, half-reading, half-watching him. Forcing a joke, "Don't go where I can't follow."

"You who live half your life in your head," Dominic muttered to himself, pushing away the sheets and fleeing to the safety of the washroom.

He wrote of distance, of barriers, of worlds unknown. The tragedy of loving someone so fully that you're jealous of the life they lived before you, the people who saw them become the person you adore.

He wrote of the violence he should have brought on those who hurt Billy before. Who made him fear stillness and dreams.

And then he wrote again of this dream, which intrigued, but no longer frightened Dominic.

.:.

_Dominic dreams the mist. Dream Billy walks beside him, into the unknown. Dominic asks him if he can hear the voices. Dream Billy does not respond._

_Dominic hears his name._

_It is as if they are calling him home._

_He sees the melting no longer as loss, but as becoming._

.:.

The dreams began to come nightly. They came when Dominic was alone, when he was twisted around Billy, when the sheets were cool and wide between them or soft and warm with sex.

After the rare dreamless nights, Dominic awoke exhausted and disappointed.

.:.

Billy stopped asking questions he knew Dominic would not answer. He laid his fingers once, briefly, on the spine of the journal when Dominic left it behind on the desk in the study.

He did not open it.

Orlando called, singing across the long distance wires, spinning the sunshine of Greece. Dominic caught up the extension before the conversation turned.

Billy did not think to call Sean.

.:.

When it came, it was almost a relief. The fog crawled in from the sea as they walked. Billy took Dominic's hand. "I don't want to lose you."

Dominic said nothing, but squeezed Billy's hand and walked onward; following the voices only he could hear.

_Only you. Only you now. Only. Alone._

Dominic released Billy's hand and stepped into the swirl of fog and grey melting voices.

.:.

It is months before Billy allows himself to open the journal. He isn't sure what he expects, something about a heartfelt confession or perhaps something from a Hollywood horror film, blood pouring from the spine.

Instead he finds page after page of painstakingly neat handwriting. Dominic must have labored over the shaping of the words as much as the choosing of them.

Billy has flipped through half the book before he realizes. Sinks to the floor, frozen by one last wall between them.

The journal is written in German.

Billy rises, places the book above the fireplace almost reverently, then goes to the door and steps, determined, into the mist.


End file.
